Friday, June 22, 2012

Wold Newman (or: The Ubiquitous Doctor Shade)

Every couple of years, I get sucked into
the fiction work of Mr Kim Newman, and it is taking me longer and longer to get
out of that pleasurable pit again, because there is always more and more of it, and it's always entertaining.

I genuinely think Newman is the most
entertaining writer on the planet, and I always love his work - from his
numerous pulp-culture drenched short stories and novels to his meticulously
researched and very funny non-fiction work.

When it comes to movies, he remains the one
reviewer I invariably can trust (I’ve even come to concede that he was probably
right about Army of Darkness), and when I pick up one of his books, I know I'm
going to be entertained and absorbed. Whether it’s as his whiskey drinking
alter-ego Jack Yeovil, or as Mr-Strokey-Beardey Critic, or as a horror writer
who finds queasy terrors in the midlands of England,
or as a builder of his own worlds.

There is so much of it now, that when I
start reading Newman’s books again, I end up reading nothing else but Dark
Future, Anno Dracula or Geneviève stories for weeks and weeks after, and it’s
always totally worth it.

1. Pulp Friction!

Orgy of the Blood Parasites was going to be
called Bloody Students, and that sums up the brilliant nastiness of Jack
Yeovil’s hard-boiling debut. The only Yeovil novel that wasn’t part of a series,
(although the name popped up on numerous genre-related reviews), it took Cronenberg
horror to a nice English university, unleashing primal rages between the exams,
and slaughtering its cast with unbridled enthusiasm.

Sometimes I think Yoevil’s books are my
favourites of all Newman’s work. They’re so busy and rushed and packed, but
even though Newman reportedly wrote most of them in a couple of weeks, there is
still room for fun and excitement, with a healthy “anything goes” attitude.

The Warhammer fantasy books are better than they
should be - Drachenfels starts with an epic quest, gets that crap out of the
way in 20 pages and gets into the real story, which somehow turns into an
extraordinary satire of the movie business in a medieval setting, and ends with
my unashamedly favourite last line in any novel ever. Beasts in Velvet is a giallo
murder mystery, right down to the gruesome deaths and weird perspectives (I’m
still chuffed that I figured out what the dead man wrote on the barrel he was
buried in), and all of the Geneviève stories have hidden depths, just like the
smile of the incredibly old teenage girl who drifts through the tales.

The Dark Future books are even better. They’re
set in a world where anything goes, post-apocalyptic shenanigans banging up
against Things From Beyond The Veil. It’s a series of books that are loaded down
with noble heroes with tarnished souls, disgusting villains that kill you if
you’re lucky, and a small mountain of pop-culture references.

Jackie catches JFK in bed with Marilyn in
the early sixties, Nixon becomes president and epically bad pollution turns
most of the US into a dangerous wasteland, filled with roaming teen gangs, and
genuine monsters in all shapes and sizes. But it’s okay, because Colonel Elvis
Aron Presley didn’t sign that contract for the devil, so there is still hope.

They area
painfully unfinished series of books, and I would give anything to read United States Cavalry, the once-promised conclusion. But I still end up reading
the whole series all the way through, over and over again, because they’re so
silly and so funny, and so noble and so passionate.

The Dark Future might be still unwritten,
and it has been an agonising wait for some of his books, but I still read new
words by Kim Newman every month, in things like Sight and Sound and Empire magazine.

I’ve been getting Empire every month since 1993, and it didn’t take long to realise Newman (or Yeovil) was writing most of
the reviews for films that I was interested in – all the gross horrors and
cheesy sci-fi’s – and he was usually right. I’ve trusted Newman’s opinion for
nearly twenty years, and it’s never steered me wrong.

After all, his criticism is always fair,
and usually manages to find something – anything – nice to say about a lot of
the films he watches. It’s still worth following up a Video Dungeon
recommendation. So much of genre film is inherently worthless, you need a
trusted voice to find the gems amongst the filth.

And he knows what he is talking about,
because unlike many reviewers who think relatively slick movies like the Hostel
or Saw films are as bad as things can get in cinema, Newman really has seen it
all, and his film knowledge is actually scary.

It’s there in all editions of the excellent
Nightmare Movies, where Newman categorises a vast amount of movies into various
sub-genres, and finds interesting ideas and themes stretching across dozens of
movies. He’s also written excellent books on western movies and apocalyptic
cinema, and his first proper book to be published was non-fiction – the fun
Ghastly Beyond Belief with pal Neil Gaiman, which is a list book of funny
quotes from genre literature and cinema – some of it is incredibly funny,
although poor old E E (Doc) smith gets an intellectual kicking.

The knowledge shown in Newman’s non-fiction
work seeps through into fiction, and they also share an undisguised enthusiasm
for all this horror rubbish. It’s still there in every issue of Empire, and
every new short story.

3. The horror, the horror

Newman’s stand-alone novels and short story
collections cover a wide range of genres and styles, but there is always,
always horror in them.

Jago, the Quorum, Life's Lottery, Bad
Dreams and The Night Mayor, along with several collections of short stories, call
upon a host of weird influences. It’s the same sort of humorous horror that British
horror fiction is so good at, a Grand Guignol of such grotesqueness, it manages
to be incredibly funny and genuinely disturbing at the same time, especially
because everybody is so bloody repressed. Built on a base of Hammer horror,
with a fair amount of Amicus and those old Rank chillers added for taste.

Newman’s horror books can be nakedly brutal
– in the climax of Jago, the hero, who is already suffering the worst toothache
in the world, bites down on a mouthful of pins so the pain can override a
psychic nightmare. But they can also be subtle – I took three goes at the
kitchen-sink Choose-Your-Own-Adventure fun of Life’s Lottery before I realized
it was a story about the horror of the mundane, and that it’s about ordinary
lives full of wrong choices that skate around the edge of something vast and
old and malevolent and ultimately lead to your doom. Unless you cheat, and then
all will be well.

There are shadowy figures lurking in the
background of these short stories and novels, who appear over and over again –
Derek Leech, born in the Thames filth and a multi-media Mephistopheles for a
New Wave Britain (and the narrator of Life Lottery), or Doctor Shade,
slithering between universes, a dark presence in a dark car.

But while these books share more than the
odd character, they also share feelings of deep dread, the sense that something
crushingly normal has gone terribly wrong, and a whole lot of body-horror.
Newman is from the Video Nasty generation of UK horror
writers, and shares a bleak and bloody view of modern horror on the council
estate that has also been mined by diverse voices such as Clive Barker, James
Herbert and Ramsey Campbell.

But there is also hope – even though there
are often horrible things happening to innocent people, the only ones in
Newman’s horror fiction who are truly damned are those who deserve it and
almost embrace their fate, (most notably in The Quroum, where Leech gets four
souls for the price of one,) and the bleakness is balanced by the occasional
piece of simple kindness.

After all, there always has to be some hope
in the darkness, or what’s the point?

4. Somewhen else

The first Kim Newman book I ever read was
Anno Dracula, which I picked up off the new release shelf at the Timaru Public
Library in 1993. This was a good place to start, especially since I’d just seem
Bram Stoker’s Dracula the week before, and it was very easy to imagine Richard
E Grant as the devilish Doctor Seward in the book.

But the thing I really loved in that book -
and the thing I still adore – was the author’s willingness to throw in an
incredible amount of references, with vampires and other dubious characters from
movies, books, television and comics filling the pages of the books.

It’s the sort of series where you see references
to the work of a Professor Langstrom at the Gotham University during a
conversation between Doctor Moreau and Herbert West, or where a prime suspect
in a later murder mystery is Superman, or where Biggles takes to the sky to
fight giant vampire bats, or where James Bond actually physically transforms from
Connery to Bond.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen did
the same sort of thing, but it’s no use playing “who did it first?’, because
Phillip Jose Farmer wins that argument every time, and it’s not just about the
fun. While it is immensely pleasurable to get a reference to some incredibly
vague story, it gives the story added weight.

Bringing in characters from other pieces of
literature negates the need for unnecessary background. A vague reference to
the fate of poor dim Carmilla can actually have resonance for anybody familiar
with her story, and when there are huge amounts of characters, there is a lot
of depth. You don’t even need to see the name Fu-Manchu to know of the
incredible schemes and plans the Oriental mastermind is working on in the
background of Anno Dracula, and when a vampire Moriarty dreams of the centuries
he can spend working on an Ultimate Mathematical Theory Of Everything, it adds
a sense of tragedy that the “real” Moriarty couldn’t put aside his hate long
enough to pursue the numbers.

I really, really like all of the Anno
Dracula books. They’re full of action and humour and some incredibly satisfying
plotting. I love playing Spot The Reference, and I don’t mind when I don’t get
them all, because I might the next time.

I’ve been reading this series of books for
nearly two decades, and I never, ever get sick of them.

On the other hand, I only just got to read
the Diogenes Club books in the past six months, after stumbling across all
three of them at a local library.

It’s almost the same world as the Anno
Dracula series, but just a little closer to reality. The Diogenes Club breaches
the gap between Arthur Conan Doyle and Adam Adamant, high octane cerebral
adventures in the world of super spies and supernatural shivers.

It was a bit much, reading all three of the books in a two week stretch, and I've already forgotten a lot of the details of these stories, but they will be worth coming back to. All of Newman's stuff is worth coming back to.

Although Newman’s books have often been
incredibly hard to find, and some – like the Diogenes Club books – fetch stupid
prices on the second hand market. But the Anno Dracula books are now out in lovely new editions from Titan, with even lovelier extra material, and even though I have bought all of the books, the new editions were impossible to pass by.

So I'm looking forward to cracking into the Vampire Romance story in the new edition of the Bloody Red Baron, and I'm extremely excited that Johnny Alucard is actually happening. And there is the Hound of the D'Urbervilles, starring Colonel Moran, another collection of linked stories, and more new short stories in strange places and thoughtful reviews and essays in the expected places, and I still haven't read Back in the USSR, or
the Doctor Who novelette he did, and it's all so much bloody fun.